With the development of mobile services facilitated by an improvement in mobile infrastructure, as existing networks migrate from 2G to 3G type networks, there is an increasing demand for improved data security. Although services for mobile users can be envisaged to include services not requiring the communication of sensitive data, sensitive data may be required for many applications providing services to users. For example, the sensitive data may represent a monetary value, which can be used to purchase items electronically using a mobile communications device. Another example of sensitive data might be, for example, a user's personal data profile or a privacy policy including a list of contacts, which are confidential to the user.
There is therefore an increasing requirement for a facility for securely distributing sensitive data efficiently and cost effectively. In particular, but not exclusively, it is desirable to distribute such sensitive data to mobile communications devices for use in providing mobile services to users.